THE NOT-SO-COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF LIBERATING TOLERANCE.

There's something of a Mark J. Perry Venn diagram to be contemplated featuring "People who denounce white Christian extremism" and "People who denounce people who denounce radical Islamic terrorism."  The good news: one of the family members reading names in New York this morning denounced "radical Islamic terrorism" to the applause of the crowd.

A 9/11 widow just rent rogue in NYC…

She read her husbands name and then called out Islamic terror and Saudi Arabia.

She called out Bush, Obama, Biden and JD Vance/Trump while they sat right in front of her. The entire crowd at ground zero cheered. pic.twitter.com/xICEZL6FOv

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) September 11, 2026

She's undoubtedly getting grief from the usual suspects.

The first step in undoing the deleterious effects of liberating tolerance, and its obnoxious manifestations in cancel culture is to recognize that it exists, and it is wrong.  Consider, dear reader, the Katyn massacre.

Herbert Marcuse might have been early into his exile, and the 1950s, 1960s attempts by leftist thinkers to distinguish revolutionary from reactionary violence were a few years away.  The institutional left of that era, however, involved cancel culture.  As long as the Hitler-Stalin, Ribbentrop-Molotov agreements to carve up Poland were in place, nobody in the American left would dare say what they ought to have been saying about Nazi Germany.  During the carve-up of Poland, it was Soviet organs of state security murdered those Polish officers, and it was Soviet propagandists who asserted those dead officers were simply another day at the ditch for the Einsatzgruppen.

The logic of revolution attempts to distinguish indefensible from justifiable acts of possibly unsanctioned violence.  Terrorists or freedom fighters, if you will.  I'm not sure it works in the case of the September 11 attack.  Yes, the World Trade Center might have been a marker of The Pennsylvania Railroad's insolvency Global Finance Capital, with the Pentagon as headquarters of latter-day Crusaders Western imperialism.  It doesn't work: the jihad as a way of bringing seventh-century moral codes out of the desert and into the developed world looks pretty reactionary, and all the creativity of Gene Roddenberry probably couldn't carry it off in Star Trek the way he did in an episode featuring Rome with tail fins.  At the time I wrote the Katyn post, which was about possibly relocating it while the Exchange Place plaza was redeveloped, "I was considering only the symbolism of previous authoritarians intending to bring low the buildings across the river (jihadis in 1993, leftist underground in the 1970s) and cannot help but think that the monument ought stay exactly where it is, in order that contemporary observers might look across the river, and reflect."  Note, dear reader, that heirs to the Weather Underground wanted the Twin Towers gone long before the jihadis took an interest in them, and that "wretched of the earth stuff" makes for an alliance of convenience between the revolutionary left and the jihadis.

It's time for liberating tolerance's trammelling of inquiry to go away.

My old "The Burden of Sixties Ideas" alluded to a distinction between reactionary and revolutionary violence, as well as to the concept of liberating tolerance, necessary because pure tolerance gives too much voice to defenders of institutions or traditions the Anointed consider oppressive.  Once upon a time, people with intellectual integrity could address those concepts in a serious way.  "At some point these acts of brazen viciousness [scaling back the public sector, to the less aggravated] are going to lead to a renewed philosophical interest in the question of when acts of political violence are morally justified, an issue that has, oddly, not been widely addressed in political philosophy since Locke."

These days, it's as if people have forgotten the basis for their faith, and they're simply chanting the worship words without grasping their meaning.

Night a restoration of a state of good repair be in order.  In City Journal, Martin Gurri noted that Our Political Masters attempting to strip the "radical Islamic" part of their counterterrorism efforts failed.

Americans remain unclear about the nature of the conflict. For that, we have only ourselves to blame. President George W. Bush was never the fool portrayed by late-night comics, but neither was he a strategic thinker. The “global war on terror” was a categorical error. We were not fighting terrorists—an endless and impossible mission, in any case. We were fighting the most radical and violent forms of political Islam: al Qaeda and ISIS on the Sunni side of the sectarian divide; and the Iranian regime and its proxies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza on the Shia side. These groups often fought one another, but they shared the same grim vision of human relations: a slaughterhouse of infidels, with Americans first in line and themselves as righteous butchers.

In part, it's the word-noise from the culture studies types that makes people who might be skeptical of Islamic primitives to hold those thoughts lest somebody scold them.  Perhaps that is changing.

Israel has crushed Hamas and occupies much of Gaza. Hezbollah, defeated and decapitated by Israel, has lost its grip on Lebanon. In Syria, regime change has installed a government openly hostile to Iran. The prime minister of Iraq, head of a multi-sectarian, multiethnic parliamentary democracy, traveled to Washington to bend the knee before Donald Trump; it is by no means the least remarkable aspect of this moment that the Iraq War seems to have been won retroactively. In Iran itself, the leadership has been decimated, the economy crippled, and the regime’s nuclear program set back by years through coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes. The long arc of violence that began with the shock and loss of 9/11 may, at last, be bending toward a satisfactory close.

The heart of the matter was always Iran, and here the conceptual blindness imposed by the “war on terror” led us astray. We treated terrorists as nonstate actors on the model of al Qaeda: enemies we could destroy anywhere, by whatever means we chose, without the least compunction. But Iran was an ancient civilization with a recognizable government and a seat at the United Nations. A succession of presidents felt what might be called a Westphalian reticence about imposing American military power on Tehran.

Iran was never really hospitable soil for primitive Islam, but primitives with automatic weapons can do a good job cowing a restive population.

In Tablet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has extensive unpleasant experience with Islam, offers a long essay notionally about the theological lunacies that turned Mohammed Atta into a terrorist mastermind.  It covers all sorts of points: for purposes of today's post I focus on this passage.

A serious 25-year stocktaking has to recover the fact that not every culture in the world is compatible with ours. Particularly when one is looking at absorbing millions of people into democratic societies shaped by Western values that developed over thousands of years and remain culturally unique, one is looking at a civilizational task that would appear to require a great deal of muscle. Founding that effort on deliberate ignorance and well-meaning lies is a sure road to disaster.

So let us start by undoing some of the well-meaning lies. Islam is not an “Abrahamic faith” that functions anything like Protestant Christianity or rabbinic Judaism. There is no equivalent in Islamic doctrine for such foundational Western concepts as the separation of church and state, secular law, or the idea of individual freedoms and rights, including the freedom to worship freely. Rather, Islam is animated by the beliefs that the Muslim world suffered a historical dispossession with the abolition of the caliphate and that this loss must eventually be reversed, including the retaking of all lands that have ever been ruled by Muslims. In the temporal sphere, Islam as much resembles totalizing and irredentist political ideologies as it does a religion.

In the frame in which both ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed political spokesmen see the world, America and the wider West are not just geopolitical rivals. They are civilizational obstacles: powers that uphold a secular, liberal, and postcaliphal order that Islamists seek to overcome.

That "separation of church and state" emerged only after bitter experience with paying church taxes to prop up cardinals and popes who had the favor of the king, with freedom of worship a way of avoiding religious wars.  Perhaps the only way out is through: make any attempt by any Moslem cleric to force compliance on people who don't share his faith so painful that they'll quit.

Islamists can sustain this claim because they draw heavily and plausibly from the Quran, Hadith, Sira, and centuries of jurisprudence that treat Islam as a total way of life ordering politics, law, and society. What they do not control is all Muslims. Their project is therefore to convert doctrinal confidence into social control by confronting ordinary Muslims with the discrepancy between their professed faith and their modern, compartmentalized lives.

Unfortunately, too many people who should know better bend over backwards to not seem insensitive.  "A recent story involved women who work at the Eiffel Tower, who were asked to make themselves scarce because a Muslim group was visiting."  What's French for "hie your woggish carcass back from whence you came?"  Yes, doggone it, I'm a September 12 American.